%0 Journal Article
%T Co-non-solvency: Mean-field polymer theory does not describe polymer collapse transition in a mixture of two competing good solvents
%A Mukherji, D.
%A Marques, C. M.
%A Stuehn, T.
%A Kremer, K.
%J Journal of Chemical Physics
%D 2015
%V 142
%N 11
%@ 0021-9606
%F Mukherji_etal2015
%O Times Cited: 4Kremer, Kurt/G-5652-2011; MPIP, Theory/I-9884-2014; Stuehn, Torsten/J-6946-2014; Marques, Carlos/B-2322-2010Marques, Carlos/0000-0002-3952-0498041089-7690
%O exported from refbase (http://www.ics-cnrs.unistra.fr/publication/show.php?record=13887), last updated on Thu, 08 Dec 2016 17:49:40 +0100
%X Smart polymers are a modern class of polymeric materials that often exhibit unpredictable behavior in mixtures of solvents. One such phenomenon is co-non-solvency. Co-non-solvency occurs when two (perfectly) miscible and competing good solvents, for a given polymer, are mixed together. As a result, the same polymer collapses into a compact globule within intermediate mixing ratios. More interestingly, polymer collapses when the solvent quality remains good and even gets increasingly better by the addition of the better cosolvent. This is a puzzling phenomenon that is driven by strong local concentration fluctuations. Because of the discrete particle based nature of the interactions, Flory-Huggins type mean field arguments become unsuitable. In this work, we extend the analysis of the co-non-solvency effect presented earlier [D. Mukherji et al., Nat. Commun. 5, 4882 (2014)]. We explain why co-non-solvency is a generic phenomenon, which can only be understood by the thermodynamic treatment of the competitive displacement of (co) solvent components. This competition can result in a polymer collapse upon improvement of the solvent quality. Specific chemical details are not required to understand these complex conformational transitions. Therefore, a broad range of polymers are expected to exhibit similar reentrant coil-globule-coil transitions in competing good solvents. (C) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC.